Chapter 2 — The Warehouse
Rust door • Bass like a heartbeat • Crowns of broken glass
Rain beads on Dio’s jacket as the warehouse door yawns open. Heat and fog swallow him whole. The air tastes like metal and sweat and something burning in the corners. The DJ wears a crown of broken glass and spins a track that feels like being remembered against your will. The sound is not music; it is confession, punishment, pulse. Bodies flash silver, then shadow. Every beat lands inside his ribs, rattling something that has been asleep too long.
He moves through the crowd like a ghost in borrowed skin. The lights cut his face into shards. People brush against him and leave glitter and smoke on his jacket. He wonders if this is what forgiveness feels like, loud enough to drown thought, bright enough to forget why he came.
Near the back, a masked photographer lifts a vintage Polaroid toward him. The flash blooms like lightning, and for a second he is nowhere. When the white fades, the photograph curls in the photographer’s hand, the image still forming. Dio sees himself in it, blurred, as if the film cannot decide whether to keep him or let him go.
Then a narrow door creaks open, a staircase spiraling into blue light. The bassline softens into something hollow and magnetic. The air shifts. Something listens.
And from somewhere above the beat, a voice slips through the fog:
“Lilith… come forward.”
The name hits him like déjà vu.
Familiar.
Heavy.
Like he should have known it all along.
Before Dio can question it, a second voice cuts through the haze—close, warm, unmistakably human.
“You brought your darkness, didn’t you?”
She steps into the blue glow at the top of the stairs, head tilted as if she’s been expecting him. The music dimples around her, bending in a way that makes his skin prickle.
Dio doesn’t know how he knows her name.
He only knows that it fits.
And that whatever is calling her…
was calling him too.